What, Me Worry?

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

-- Lewis Carroll

I took my last prednisone today, hopefully for at least a while. That stuff makes you jumpy. It upsets your sleep patterns, it's no help at all in meditation, and I've been taking the stuff in big doses the last two months. It's been some benefit, not as much as I'd hoped, but I'll take what I can get, especially while I muddle through a transition in doctors, since the pulmonologist I'd been seeing has decided to leave his private practice. Meantime, my prescription for Advair (yay, another steroid!) unexpectedly expired, and I felt briefly as if I had myself fallen through the cracks of our dysfunctional medical system. By chance, I had visited a colleague of my new doctor some time back, which is more than I can say for my new doctor, who won't see me until next month. Only that visit to his colleague prompted his office to send a renewal of that prescription. Without it, and with my old doctor off to who knows where, I would have been in a world of hurt. Welcome to the Great Society!

Be that as it may... at least I'm getting a little more comfortable in my meditation again, with far fewer drugs in my system. Since I'm not so jumpy, I'm feeling less bored with sitting still, and I'm able to be consistently more quiet overall, and it feels good. I might even try to talk a bit about Zen this time. Let's just throw caution to the wind, what do you say!

If you're interested in Zen, but don't know much about it, I would certainly suggest you visit a Zen Center near you, and to buy or borrow some good books on the topic. I would hate to think you learned all you know from me. But I'll be happy to describe a little of what I do. You can compare it to what the experts say. I'm just a semi-retired actor/programmer. I know nothing.

I have the requisite Zen cushions, called a zafu and a zabuton, wherein the small round pillow (the zafu) is placed on the mat (the zabuton), so that one can sit on the small zafu cross-legged, with good support, and meditate in relative comfort for extended sessions. Of course, I don't always use the pillows. Sometimes, I defer to age, or perhaps laziness, and simply sit cross-legged in my large recliner chair. I personally think some formalities are overrated, but then, I told you I'm not the expert. For me, the important thing is to sit with good balanced posture and a straight, upright back. I really can't do the lotus; my legs are fairly muscular and thick, and they weren't close to being flexible enough even when I was meditating in my twenties. The lotus is better if you can do it, but mostly my legs are just crossed. I appreciate that form is very important in Zen, but I try to honor that mostly with my straight back and my cupped hands forming my mudra.

The mudra is very important. I relax my arms, but keep them slightly away from my sides, and lay the fingers of my left hand over those of my right, in front of me. My thumbs touch each other gently to form the "cosmic" oval close to my navel. My mudra has become pretty solid, my hands relaxed, and from there I just breathe, and focus on following my breathing.

I suppose the most difficult thing for anyone to deal with in zazen, other than some discomfort maintaining the zazen posture, is what to think. I have read and listened to many Zen masters on that topic for many years, and while they've all mostly said the same things, I have managed to remain confused for most of those years. Now, I'm much more ready to take what they said at the face value, and literally just think about each breath going in and out. I've dealt with the frustration of that seeming complete waste of time, and I've let my mind wander in fantasies more often than I'd care to admit. After a while, though, it starts to sink in, and I just pay attention.

I know the most completely wasted times I've spent in meditation were the times I felt like I was "making progress" toward being a "better me." Master Shunryu Suzuki would tell me that no time is really wasted, but it seems like nothing disrupts meditation faster than trying to see how well it's working. If you've read Buddhist literature of any kind, you know that the desire for personal gain is our fatal attachment, the root cause of all our pain and suffering. But that seems a very conceptual thing, and it's hard to imagine not being attached to this world and our ability to make ourselves useful to it in some way. Fortunately, Zen doesn't put much stock in concepts.

Now when I meditate, I feel the difference between the calm moment by moment experience of sitting and breathing slowly, and the tense diffusion of thoughts as I focus on goals and achievements while each of those moments drift slowly away. I am learning to appreciate those homely little moments on my zafu or chair, even if they're not very special. It's a little easier to see now that those moments will never come again, and if I don't enjoy them just a little bit now, the chance is lost forever. I know that when I stopped trying so hard to be a Zen master in my meditation, I started to feel just a little bit of what they must have felt. I know, too, that you may read this paragraph over and over again, but you'll only understand that when you are ready.

When I've written about Zen, I've tried to make it seem so prosaic one might wonder why bother to do it at all. I've described it as little more than calisthenics, and I'm not backing down on that score. Zen is terribly misunderstood here in the West. I think we're so anxious to imbue something like Zen with such extraordinary qualities that we completely cover it with our own opinions until it can't even be found. Folks, it really is just what it looks like. It's nothing fancy. You're more likely to improve yourself reading Chomsky, or watching Hardball, for goodness' sake. You're sitting cross-legged like a lump. It is what it is.

I've done a lot of calisthenics over the years. Until my condition began to really slow me down nearly two years ago, I was doing 300 toe-touches, 200 push-ups, and 150 sit-ups every day like clockwork, and I enjoyed being fit and energetic from that discipline. Even there, I knew the best push-ups were those when I really concentrated and paid attention. Even there, it took a focused mind to get results. That's all to say that there is something else about Zen that's a little like attitude. Perhaps a better way to put it is it's about heart. Beyond that, I would be hard pressed to give a description. If you try zazen, I think you'll understand.

I've often referred to my spiritual hero Shunryu Suzuki, and this is a good place to plug the late master's most famous books: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and Not Always So. Master Suzuki writes far better than I can about the delicate topic of the mental approach to zazen. For the most part, I would say don't worry about it. Don't be upset when your focus is poor, or your mind wanders. A standard approach that I still use myself on many occasions is to count your breaths from one to ten, and then start over. It helps to keep the mind focused on the breathing, and gives the mind less chance to get lost in its random thoughts. But that's bound to happen over and over again for quite a while. When it does, don't beat yourself up. It's part of the process. Just go back and start counting your breaths all over again.

If you start thinking about something, it's ok to go with that, and think that thought all the way through to its end. A good rule of thumb, though, is, as Master Suzuki would say, "there are no second thoughts in Zen." Don't look to follow up on that random thought once it's completed. Just go back to counting, or just following, the breaths. If and when another "compelling" thought wants attention, deal with it, don't just try and push it away. Soon enough, the more distracting thoughts are fewer, and your mind becomes calm and quiet as your breathing deepens. For me, this feels like coming back to point zero.

I'm not going to try and make you believe I know all about point zero. I've never actually made it that far, as near as I can tell. It's not that out of reach to get fairly close, though, and I think this may be one of the best ways to see the advantages of Zen. To use a truly disturbing analogy, the old (but still sometimes useful) practice of electroshock therapy has been used to disrupt the destructive patterns of mental patients. I think that approaching point zero in meditation might be a preferable approach to getting out of those mental ruts, if I'm allowed to choose. Once I go back to thinking again, my thought patterns may not have improved, but I've gotten them off to a little bit of a fresher start. I think it helps me to be more flexible and resilient.

It's good to take a little time out here and run my mouth about Zen a bit. I don't want to get too carried away with it. I definitely think it's useful not to make too much of Zen, and it's really counter-productive to get all excited about it. I like haikus as much as the next guy, but it's nice to just keep things in perspective. A fresh and flexible mind has a lot of potential, perhaps even the mind rattling around in my much-battered skull, but it certainly won't change things as much as you might hope. It's just a mind that's a little more ready for the task at hand.

Is there a way to prepare the mind for the things we're having to wrap our heads around now in this troubled world? Can we look at Musharraf in Pakistan without at least half a dozen really cataclysmic thoughts clamoring for dominance? Who's guarding the nukes? Is Musharraf giving George any ideas? Where's Osama? Then there's the redoubtable Michael Mukasey and his champions in the Senate. I know I'll always think of him as Mr. Waterboard. But hey, America was always over-rated anyway, right? I'm sure gonna miss it, though. We're just another country that tortures now. America is what you read about in history books.

I recommend a lot of meditation in the coming weeks. I think it will be important to stay as fresh as possible. There aren't many out there who act like they're paying much attention to that Big Mind that may be the better part of us all, but I'll do what I can to be quiet for Big Mind if it so much as whispers. I think right now we're going to need all the help we can get.